Tag Archives: skype

But as I’ve been writingabout lately, I’m thinking more about the tools that we are using in our classrooms and the costs (economic, moral and privacy) of using them.

This has brought me back around with a sense of perspective to the industry of education. Lets make no mistake, education is a big business. There are are dozens of companies making millions (and possibly billions) of dollars from schools. This isn’t new. Textbook, desk and chalk companies used to make lots of money from the business of education as well.

I understand that and I am comfortable with that. Just as I, as a teacher, expect to get a pay cheque every two weeks for the hours that I work in my classroom, companies need to get paid for the work they do and for the supplies and resources that they deliver.

But I’ve been thinking about the companies that choose to involve themselves with education. Of course there are major companies which have been involved with education for years: Apple, Microsoft and Pearson come to mind. These three multinationals have arms stretching in many directions and have involved themselves with education in areas as diverse as software, hardware, teacher training, online courses and textbooks. They each need to be seriously examined and held to account regarding their policies and products surrounding teaching and learning. But they aren’t who this post is about. This post is about the small companies, the start ups and what they are bringing to education.

When companies first start up, they are often a side project or a labour of love from someone’s garage. Over time however, when people want to expand their company, they often try to acquire venture capital (VC) funding. Venture capitalists are people who are willing to take a large risk on a new company, often in exchange for owning a portion of that company. High risks sometimes lead to big losses, but they can also lead to big payouts if companies do well.

As our industry has changed, there are many more small companies looking to acquire some of the dollars that schools and school divisions spend. A walk through the trade show floor of any major conference will bring you into contact with dozens or even hundreds of different companies. While some of these are large booths staffed by a dozen or more people who work for a major company, many of these companies are small and are trying to break in to the business.

This is where my curiosity lies. Who are the companies that have been receiving VC funding lately? How do they want to change and improve education? What is the value that they hope to add to the enterprise of education?

I did a number of Google searches as well as tracking down information in a few other places and here are a few examples of what I’ve found:

(the final link to the Lumos Labs story is well worth exploring as it contains, among other things, a list of the biggest edtech deals of 2012)

There are dozens of news and financial stories regarding edtech companies out there. This is a miniscule sampling of them. There are other stories that outline mergers and new products coming online. There are many press releases outlining new educational apps that are available.

But from all of these stories, there is a trend. And it is a trend that worries me. Each of the companies covered in this small sampling of stories, with the exception of Coursera, are regarding companies who look at education in a specific way. Each of these companies creates a product (or products) which circle around helping students to learn basic skills. Now, before everyone jumps on me, I understand that basic skills are important. I believe that students need to read and write at higher levels at this point in history than they ever have in the past. What worries me is that the grand majority of new products and investment money in education is not going to companies looking at the “big picture” of education. Again, with the exception of Coursera, none of the companies in my small list are concerned with connecting students in new or better ways. None of them are helping students to become more engaged with the important problems that our society faces. None of them are helping students to become more passionate learners. None of them are focused on creativity. Instead, millions of dollars is being invested in companies who are offering products to help students learn old skills more efficiently.

We talk about changes in education. We talk about a renewed, responsive and changing industry to meet the needs of a globalized, diverse society; but where are the millions of dollars headed in educational technology? To better A, B, Cs and 1, 2, 3s.

Once again, I get it. I know all about the need for basics and the pressure that legislation such as NCLB creates. But with funding heading to these types of companies, technology is not gaining any opportunity to change education. You may be able to argue that these dollars are producing better schooled children, but they certainly aren’t going to companies that will allow children the opportunity to become better educated, more passionate, or more connected.

Are there companies out there that do create products that connect students around the world in new ways and with new and different empowering sources of information? I believe there are. I think that Discovery is doing this. I believe that Edmodo creates a platform which can be used effectively in these ways. I would argue that some of the basic tools we had almost a decade ago have yet to be surpassed: Skype, WordPress and wikis in all of their various forms offer teachers the tools they need to transform education.

Data is important. Better data that we have never had consistent access to in the past will help teachers to be more efficient and effective. But better data will not transform education, or schools, or classrooms. It will not help students to have a broader, more global understanding of world cultures. It will not make students more creative or help them to become better at finding and solving problems.

Our best opportunity for all of those things still lies with talented, connected teachers.

I don’t usually take the time to complain about technology. Things work… or they don’t.

But this morning I’m downright angry, extremely sad and disappointed for the kids in my classroom for the second time in a few weeks.

Skype has always been one of the great additions to my classroom. It has brought us connections from across the globe over years. We’ve learned to make photostories from David Jakes in Chicago, talked to classrooms in Los Angeles, on Long Island, in South America and in Asia. This year we’ve had an almost daily call with our Idea hive partners in Ontario. We’ve had Silvia Tolvisano teach us valuable lessons about cristallnacht and world war 2. Countless connections.

But in the last several weeks we’ve had two “mission critical” failures from this cornerstone technology:

1.) We’ve worked hard for months with our partners in Ontario in Heather Durnin’s class on Markus Zusak’s brilliant novel The Book Thief. We read it aloud everyday using skype and then wrote our own version of a Field Guide to Molching and published it on lulu.com. The day the books showed up, we were scheduled to have a skype call as we unwrapped the books together in each classroom. We wanted the kids to see each other as this event took place. And Skype failed. Skype was down for hours across wide swaths of the world.

2.) More importantly, Heather had worked hard to get in contact with Markus Zusak himself. Saying that he doesn’t usually do this kind of thing, he agreed to stay up until midnight in Australia and skype with our two classes. This was to be the highlight of the school year for my classroom. The culmination of months of work and the chance to meet this talented author. Every student in my class arrived an hour early for school. We were making an event out of it, calling it “Breakfast with Markus Zusak.” The kids brought all kinds of food. When the appointed hour arrived – no skype service for us. We worked desperately on our end, even finding a tech geek at our division office who was in working early who stood on his head to try to get the service up and running for us. All to no avail. The kids in my classroom were hugely disappointed to say the least. Lots of kids hanging their heads. More frustrating was the fact that the service worked fine an hour after we needed it.

This is the frustration felt by teachers starting off with technology and then things not working out for them. This is the reason that people are reluctant to jump on board. While I am not swearing off using technology in my classroom by any means, I’m frustrated, I’m angry, I’m sad for the kids in my classroom who worked so many hours for this day. And then things didn’t work.

Once this process finished, we moved into collaborative writing mode where each day students worked in small groups on google docs to work on writing a field guide to Molching, the fictional town at the centre of The Book Thief, the novel we had read. Once again, students talked on skype, worked in chatrooms and used a number of tools to pull together an guide book that was 85 pages long. We pulled all of their pictures and writing together and moved over to Lulu.com where we published the entire thing. (You can order a physical copy if you want. The entire piece is also available here as a free pdf)

This process took months. We started reading the novel in November and didn’t finish writing the our book until May. While we didn’t work every day together due to scheduling conflicts, snow days, ice days, professional development, etc., etc we did take many hours of classroom time to completed this process.

And I don’t regret a single one.

The looks on the faces of the students when the boxes were opened and the real, physical books came out, was worth every moment of frustration.

But more than that, after seventeen years of teaching, this process taught me more about reading and writing using new tools than any other project in the past.

1.) Writing has been a solitary action in the past only because this was the only mode available. When authors sat down with a pen and paper to write a novel or a poem, they were by themselves simply because only one person could physically occupy the space of a piece of paper at one time. But having a small group of students collaborate on a single piece of writing, no matter if they are 2 700 kms apart, has changed my thoughts on this. There is great power in having students work together to make a single sentence just right. There is power in having them set roles in a chat room and then work together, day after day, on document after document, to build something together. Writing, revising and then editing a single document together teaches students about good writing.

2.) Reading aloud makes a lot of things happen. We read this book aloud to two classrooms full of students each day over skype. While one of us was reading, the other worked in a backchannel with all of the students in it. We posed questions for them about what they were hearing, but mostly, we took part as one of them. We listened along as they did. We responded ourselves to what we were hearing. We cried and laughed along with them. We marvelled at the hundreds of comments that scrolled by in chatrooms every single day. We learned that when we read to students, while they often look passive, sitting in a desk listening to the story as it flows by them, there is endless possibilities going on inside of them. At the end of each day’s reading, we had the students post a response on a sticky wall. Again, sometimes we let a question for them, but often we just looked to them for their responses. We were often amazed at what we found.

3.) Its’s all about the connection. We had days where we couldn’t connect. Skype broke down on us several times. Snow days and ice days saw Heather and I exchanging messages before the school day began. Professional development days interrupted schedules. Trips and travels left students with substitute teachers who had no idea of how we were doing what we were doing. But through all this, the kids would comment: “we missed you yesterday. How are you?” We’d bug each other about hockey scores. Our cold weather in Snow Lake became a constant source of amazement for students in much warmer Southern Ontario, while their early spring left us jealous. Each day, bit by bit, with each piece of information, call, blog post and comment, we gres into a learning community. Students showed up in chatrooms when they were travelling or home from school sick. They wanted to be there.

4.) Watching kids write is cool. Writing with a group of kids on a google doc is amazing. Blank documents surrounded by ideas in chatrooms soon filled up with brainstormed thoughts. The formatting changed to notes as they researched. Finally, some enterprising student would step up and begin writing a first draft. Others would chime in, add new paragraphs and pieces. Others would start revising and soon a document emerged. You just can’t do this stuff on paper. We simply didn’t have access to this kind of information. New tools bring us new understandings of how things happen.

Many steps. Many hours. Great learning for students. Great learning for teachers. This is the stuff that classrooms can be about.

One of my new town council members has a winter holiday scheduled. He asked last night at a meeting if he would be allowed to set up a conference call when he is away so that he won’t miss out on anything.

I told him that under our organizational by-law, councillors are counted as present at a meeting if they are using a “communication technology” to attend. Another member looked at him and said, “why don’t you just set up a skype call? We can set you up at the end of the table and you can see and hear everything that is going on.”

Small town councillors skyping in from warmer climes….

Clay Shirky was (as usual) right; technology only really gets interesting when most people have access to it and understand it.

Over the last two weeks, Heather Durnin and I have worked to bring the kids in the Idea Hive closer together on a daily basis.

We’ve been reading one novel with our two classes, but we’ve been doing it over skype. Wondering what kind of support we can bring to a text with tech tools, we decided to take a novel (in our case The Book Thief) and read it aloud to our classes. Each day at 10:30 AM Snow Lake time (11:30 in Wingham) our two classrooms meet on skype and we take turns reading this powerful novel. One day Heather reads aloud, the next day I do. But the person who isn’t reading also has a job to do – they run a backchannel. The Book Thief can be a difficult text for kids to understand, it takes a lot of discussion to fill in blanks and talk through the context of young teens growing up in Nazi Germany. So we decided to add a backchannel to the reading. While one of us reads, the kids in both classrooms and the other teacher chat in a today’smeet room, discussing the text, asking questions, making predictions and dropping in great pieces of the text as it is read aloud over skype.

Also, each day after we are finished our approximately 20 minutes of reading, we have set up a wall where the students from each class post their thoughts, opinions, questions, predictions and ideas from the day’s reading.

Doing a read aloud this way has been a great experience for a few reasons:

1.) The students get ongoing support with the text, live and in real time as it is being read aloud. Instead of just sitting in their desks listening and being interested or confused, they are able to post what is going on in their heads in this chat room getting instant feedback and support from 44 other students.

2.) They are getting all sorts of new and different perspectives on the text that they probably would not come up with on their own. Learning is stronger in a network than alone.

3.) Each day the chats and the wall are examined. As teachers, we can quickly see the students who are lost and confused giving us an opportunity to target them in our instruction. This way, we have a written record of the kinds of questions that are being asked and the troubles that kids are having.

As part of this, I examined the first two chats and found a few interesting things:

1.) The kids are making few predictions about what is being read to them. This is an area that we need to target.

2.) As the kids get more comfortable with this process, they are interacting with each other more and more. In the first two chats alone, there was a significant jump in the number of students who were either posing questions about what was being read, or responding to the questions of others. While the first chat definitely did see some interaction, the second saw a dramatic increase in this.

3.) Those with more IM experience have quickly taught others some of the conventions of working like this. For example, in the first chat, one student typed an “@” symbol to answer a question posed by another. This quickly spread and is now standard. As well, the students will type an “*” symbol to correct a spelling error they made in one posting to correct it in another. When this first emerged in a chat, one student specifically asked another what it meant. Answered that the “*” is used to correct something. Once again, this has spread throughout the room and is now standard.

4.) There have been 546 postings in the chatrooms between the two reading sessions. While there certainly have been some off – task comments posted, these have been very few. That shows the amount of activity that is going on in the minds of our students as we read to them. Constructing meaning is certainly not a passive, receptive process.

Since we’ve started we’ve had to read a few times on our own because of technical difficulties or scheduling problems, and to be honest, it’s been kind of a lonely experience. Once you start working in networked ways like this, the power of being together is something that you expect. Working on your own just isn’t the same.